Wikipedia 'editorial policy' - interesting article

... Attempts to edit these articles to provide more balance are summarily ignored, and even neutral, well-intentioned editors have been banned. Articles with citations only from unreliable, uninformed, or cynical sources might be useful for promoting favored ideologies, but only in an Orwellian world could such an encyclopedia be considered anything but a work of fiction. Indeed, this very blog was labeled an "unreliable source" when I've simply pointed out an easily demonstrable mathematical fact.

I used to wonder why those in charge of Wikipedia would allow such biases to persist. I imagined that they were simply uninformed at how a small group of enthusiastic fact-deniers had highjacked the system. But now something has happened that illuminates the problem.

On Change.org, the Association for Comprehensive Energy Psychology posted a petition to ask Jimmy Wales, one of the founders of Wikipedia, to "create and enforce new policies that allow for true scientific discourse about holistic approaches to healing." The ACEP posted this position because publications relevant to their interests have faced the same sort of systematic negative bias as articles on psi research. The response by Wales was as follows:

No, you have to be kidding me. Every single person who signed this petition needs to go back to check their premises and think harder about what it means to be honest, factual, truthful. Wikipedia's policies around this kind of thing are exactly spot-on and correct. If you can get your work published in respectable scientific journals - that is to say, if you can produce evidence through replicable scientific experiments, then Wikipedia will cover it appropriately. What we won't do is pretend that the work of lunatic charlatans is the equivalent of "true scientific discourse". It isn't.​

Besides the snarky insult, this response reveals more than ignorance. It indicates that Wales has allowed his amygdala to trump his frontal lobes ...

The points made are generally good ones, but please be aware that the perspective is influenced by a parapsychology view.

Its ironic that some view topics in holistic medicine and parapsychology disdainfully, yet blindly accept psychogenic psychiatry. Everything requires an objective and rational view. Parapsychology is on the outside of established power, but psychogenic medicine isn't. I have no belief in parapsychology, or esoteric energy healing systems, and don't promote them, but at the same time they do far less harm than psychogenic psychiatry.

If they can get the evidence together, and perform quality experiments that demonstrate their claims, good luck to them. The same goes with psychogenic psychiatry. Yet to date I see no tangible evidence that psychogenic psychiatry is not pseudoscience, and lots of evidence that it is.

I heard on the radio that medicals doctors regularly do 'research' on widipedia.

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This wouldn't surprise me but the radio is probably an even worse source than Wikipedia.

The current magic font of wisdom in medicine is Evidence Based Medicine, yet its so severely flawed that I doubt it can be considered that much better than Wikipedia. Like Wikipedia a lot has to do with who is doing the work, and what biases they ignore. Some of EBM is undoubtedly very good, just like Wikipedia; some of it is unreliable, just like Wikipedia, and some of it is blatantly biased, just like Wikipedia.

Prejudice, bias and ignorance are pandemic throughout human society. Doctors and other experts fool themselves if they think they are above all that. Science evolved as a way to try to cut through the bias, but too often what passes for "science" these days should not be considered science at all. Even in science though there is, or at least should be, recognition that any scientific finding can be overturned. Some of the groups defending modern "science" seem to think that once written its always right.

It was National Public Radio. I don't even listen to commercial radio (unless I come across a great song from my past while changing stations).

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Media get it wrong all the time. Then the wrong information gets picked up by other media, and it gets propagated around the world. This is the problem with the phenomena called churnalism. See my blog: